Conservative observers of the post-Election Day chaos in Florida, Georgia and elsewhere must understand that the mess is not due to incompetence. It is part of a larger, long term plan that has been executed by Democrats to move as many elections as possible into what our friend election lawyer J. Christian Adams calls “the margin of litigation.”

Once inside the margin of litigation, election laws and the rules and deadlines, with which honest Republican candidates complied pre-election, are thrown out the window by activist Leftist judges and highly partisan Democrat supervisors of elections to the advantage of Democratic candidates and committees who knew in advance that ballots that were illegal on their face would have a good chance of being counted.

Thus, we see in Georgia that a judge ordered three heavily Democratic precincts to stay open late, introducing thousands of provisional ballots into the election.

Richard Barron, Fulton County, Georgia’s director of registration and elections, said the issue at Booker T. Washington and Archer Hall precincts was college students. Many were registered to vote elsewhere but insisted on filling out provisional ballots where they were. Barron said there were so many people filling out provisional ballots at the high school that the precinct ran out of them and had to print more.

“I think it’s setting a bad precedent for the future,” Barron said of the efforts to keep those three locations open later. “It seemed to be judicial activism.”

Those patently illegal provisional ballots are votes the Democrats seek to add to their tally.

Using judicial activism, Democrats have sought to delay Georgia’s statutory certification deadline and require counties to count absentee ballots rejected for missing information and other inaccuracies. The suit would also require that counties accept provisional ballots that were rejected because the voters live in a different county.

A separate filing by a Democratic congressional campaign seeks to delay Gwinnett County from certifying its election results in order to count a cache of nearly 1,000 absentee ballots that had been previously rejected. That echoes other lawsuits targeting Gwinnett’s disproportionately high reporting of signature-related absentee ballot rejections.

One Democrat lawsuit asks the court to require absentee ballots rejected for “arbitrary” reasons, such as a mistake in a statutorily required birthdate or missing information, to be counted. As many as 2,000 ballots were dismissed because of such problems.

And it would require counties to accept provisional ballots that were rejected because the voters live in a different county. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ campaign said this could affect thousands of additional votes.

While many of Georgia’s rural counties had already certified their votes, most of the more densely-populated metro Atlanta counties that overwhelmingly tilted toward Democrats delayed doing so as the search for “new” votes widened.

And that search for “new” votes bore fruit.

A cache of 5,500 provisional and mail-in ballots was reported that showed Republican Brian Kemp’s lead over Democrat Stacey Abrams shrinking slightly to about 59,000 votes. Some came from counties that days earlier reported all votes had been tallied.

Tuesday was the date for Georgia counties to certify the election, but Gwinnet County has yet to do so.

And the tight race for Georgia’s 7th Congressional District hangs in the balance in Gwinnet County. Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux trails Republican U.S. Rep. Rob Woodall by about 500 votes, but that margin could narrow further because hundreds of ballots are still pending in Gwinnett.

What’s more Democrat Stacey Abrams claims that there are still another roughly 20,000 ballots still pending statewide – even after the statutory reporting deadline.

U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg, an activist Democrat who has donated thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates, on Monday ordered election officials to review as many as 27,000 provisional ballots that were cast because voters’ registration or identification couldn’t be verified at the polls.

And the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that a separate ruling on Tuesday ordered Gwinnett officials to count absentee ballots that contain errors or omissions in statutorily required birthdates, a court order that could affect roughly 300 ballots that were rejected there. Another cache of as many as 150 absentee ballots with alleged signature mismatches could also be tallied, county officials said.

And a third federal judge was considering whether to order all Georgia counties statewide to count absentee ballots that are missing statutorily required birthdate information on the envelope. He also could rule on whether people who tried to vote in a county where they weren’t registered will have their votes counted.

None of these rulings and actions advance the cause of free, fair and transparent elections, rather they move elections into the margin of litigation where activist judges and partisan election officials use the chaos they created to overturn the will of the people as expressed on a timely, legally cast ballot.